From Sister to Sister to Flik
by Number1PixarFan
Summary: For the Can We Talk? forum's January challenge, "Before the Beginning." As they grow up, Atta has profound conversations with her young sister that make her think about their society and her own relationship with Flik.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: This fic is for the Can We Talk? forum's January challenge, Before the Beginning. The title is pretty self-explanatory: Write about the life of a fandom's characters before the events in the fandom's canon start. It must also contain at least one allusion to an important role the characters play in the original work. Each of the three chapters in this story contains one allusion.**

**For the challenge participants who are not familiar with A Bug's Life: This chapter's allusion is that in the movie, Dot has trouble flying because her wings are too weak. Towards the end, she is attacked by a particularly frightening grasshopper named Thumper, who scares her so much, she falls off a cliff. Naturally, she tries really hard to fly and saves herself.**

**Please R&R!**

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The most important skill for a young princess whose destiny was to one day take over her mother's role as queen to learn is leadership. And the best way to teach a young princess about leadership is to set her up with the task that teaches an uncountable number of children worldwide about being a leader: babysitting her younger siblings.

And yes, this truth does apply to young ant princesses. Take six-months-and-eighteen-days-old (equal to eleven ant years) Princess Atta. She was now at the age that the Queen of Ant Island felt comfortable with leaving three-ant-year-old Dot in her care. And thus began Atta's royal training in leadership.

Atta didn't consider it training at the time. Her mother actually made a point not to use the word in association with the babysitting around her. Atta already had constant examinations on the history and customs of Ant Island and the Queen didn't want to risk a meltdown by letting her suspect that looking after Dot was really just more work. And Atta actually looked forward to spending time with her little sister, since Dot was already very smart and curious for her age but was still cute and fun to play with, making avoiding the "training" label even easier.

The one difference that most separated the babysitting from all of Atta's other training was that she would occasionally be interrupted by non-royals.

One afternoon, Atta and Dot were playing tag in a clearing near the tree in the center of Ant Island. Dot was It, and, of course, being only three years old, could not catch up with her sister. That is, until Atta saw a certain young harvester ant innocently walking down the clearing and stopped running. Dot finally caught up to Atta and tagged her. She clapped and squealed, "I got you!" but Atta was too busy rolling her eyes to notice.

The kid heard Dot shouting and looked in their direction. "Princess!" he shouted when he saw Atta, grinning. He started running in her direction — or at least tried to, because the yellow flower he was holding was really weighing him down.

"Hi, Flik," Atta said flatly when he finally reached them. "What's the flower for?"

"It's actually a dandelion! And it was the only one that I could find that was still yellow." Flik paused, interpreting the blank look on Atta's face as confusion. "You know, like how all of the other dandelions are all white and puffy now?"

"Yeah. That's fantastic," Atta replied unenthusiastically.

"Would you, um, would you like it?" Flik asked, struggling for words. "I thought that you might."

"Sure . . . " Atta said with a touch of sarcasm that Flik really didn't register.

"Great, then! Here you go!" He held the dandelion out for Atta to take, which she reluctantly did. He stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, possibly waiting for Atta to start up a conversation. When he realized that she wasn't going to, he waved half-heartedly, uttered a nervous, "Bye, Princess," and ran off.

Dot watched this whole exchange with a look of wonder in her eyes. When the boy was gone, she turned to her sister and asked, "That was Flik?"

Atta nodded. "Yeah, that was Flik. He really likes me. A lot."

Dot thought for a few seconds, then said, "He has a creepy crush on you."

Atta was shocked at her little sister. "Dot! Where did you learn that from?"

"You said that to Mama one time."

"Well," Atta said as she picked her sister up, "sometimes I say things that aren't very nice. Don't repeat anything I say if you've never heard it before anymore, okay?"

"Okay," Dot said. Then she yawned, "I'm tired."

"Do you want to go back to the anthill to go to sleep?" Atta said. Dot nodded. "Okay, then. I'll fly us back. It'll be faster." She really wasn't supposed to carry her sister around while flying, but that didn't stop her from lifting her small wings from her back and slowly floating off the ground with Dot in tow.

Dot relaxed and lay her head down in her sister's arms. "I like how you can fly," she whispered.

"Well, you know what? You'll be able to fly someday, too," Atta said.

"But I don't have wings!"

"They'll grow in, I promise."

"Maybe they _won't_. Maybe I'll never fly. Or I'll be a bad flyer and I'll fall down."

"Oh, Dot, don't think like that. Queen ants' wings _always _grow in. And even if you have a hard time flying, one day you'll really need to fly and then you will fly, no problem."

"Oh." Dot closed her eyes and fell asleep just as Atta landed at the mouth of the anthill.

Atta brought her to the royal family's sleeping quarters and tucked her into the crib that the head carpenter ant had fashioned from twigs that had fallen from the big tree. "Goodnight, Dot," she whispered. Then, she headed to the anthill's schoolroom for her big history examination. Oh, how she hated training!

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**A/N: And thus concludes chapter one. Three more to go!**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: I felt the need to apologize for the long wait, but I'm publishing this whole thing all at once, so whoever is reading this won't know the difference.**

**This chapter's allusion: During the movie, Flik goes out on a quest to rescue his colony, and mistakes a circus troupe for a band of warriors. He enlists them to protect the colony. (He doesn't figure out his mistake until later.)**

**R&R!**

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By the time Atta was thirteen, she had figured out the true nature of her babysitting sessions on her own. As a result of both this discovery and becoming a teenager, Atta started to resent playing with her now five-year-old sister. But as Dot was getting older, she was becoming more adventurous and therefore required even more attention.

But sometimes Atta forgot that. Take this as an example.

"Dot! Where'd you go?" Atta shouted. She had been half-heartedly watching over Dot in the central hub of the anthill when Dot suddenly disappeared. Knowing Dot's size, she couldn't have gotten too far, but she could have been anywhere in the hub. Now, Atta had to half-heartedly search for her little sister among the clumps of dirt and leaves and the huge mushrooms that filled the inside of the anthill while the other half of her mind wandered.

Eventually, letting her mind wander did actually help, because it allowed her to briefly remember a scene that happened not long before she lost Dot. Dot had approached her and asked if they could play hide-and-seek and Atta had, once again half-heartedly, responded with a simple, "Oh, yeah. Whatever you want." Now Dot had gone and hid, and Atta had to resort to one of the most embarrassing strategies ever.

"Wow, Dot sure is a good hider," she announced loudly in a very fake, bored, rehearsed-sounding voice. "I don't think there's any way I'll ever be able to find her."

Just as Atta predicted, Dot emerged from her hiding spot — a particularly disgusting and pathetic little mushroom that Atta would have never even dared to go near — giggling, obviously very proud of herself. Of course, this wasn't the first time that Atta had had to lure her out of her hiding spot using this method, but at Dot's age, there was no end to the joys she could reap from triumphing in this fashion.

"Don't do that again, Dot," Atta sighed.

"But you never play any games with me anymore, and I was bored!" Dot protested.

"I know, but — " Atta was about to explain why Dot _shouldn't_ hide while she wasn't paying attention, but she was interrupted by a familiar voice shouting her name.

Flik was running towards her from the entrance to the anthill, looking worried. "Don't worry, Princess Atta, I'll help you!" He nearly ran into her, but he tripped on a root and fell at her feet instead. "I heard you yelling that you couldn't find Dot. I think I have something that can help you find her!"

Atta couldn't tell if he was serious or not. "Flik, Dot is right — "

Flik cut her off as he stood up. "No questions, but I found these rocks the other day that actually come together and stick to each other!" He took a shiny black rock out from behind his back. Without warning, Dot started moving towards Flik from where she was standing at a rapid pace. She was screaming, however, and it seemed like she was being dragged by an invisible ant by her arms. When she stopped, she was hanging from Flik's rock, grabbing onto an almost identical, though smaller, pebble for dear life.

Atta looked at Flik as if he were insane. Flik stared at the spectacle before him, wide-eyed and grinning. "It worked!" he whispered excitedly to himself.

"What the heck, Flik?" Atta asked in disbelief.

"Well, this morning I saw that Dot had a rock just like mine, and I thought that if she was ever lost, I could hold my rock out, and it would bring me to her!" Flik looked at the little girl hanging onto the rock he was holding. "Or bring her to me," he added sheepishly.

He set Dot down next to her sister, and noticed Atta's disapproving frown. Hoping to make her happier, he said, "And it worked, Princess! I found her! Don't tell me you aren't impressed!"

Atta sighed, and decided to give it to him straight. "Actually, I had already found her. You really didn't do anything more than scare her. I appreciate that you _want _to help, but you're not."

Flik bowed his head, ashamed. "Sorry, Princess Atta. I didn't realize . . . I had no idea that . . . I'm sorry." He walked back to the surface of Ant Island, without even one wistful look back.

As Atta watched him, she felt the slightest bit of guilt. She knew it was pointless, though. This kind of thing happened almost every day. He always came back. He always made her babysitting job twice as painful, twice as stressful.

The only thing was that Dot, despite and possibly because of the constant near-death experiences, was fascinated by Flik. She loved playing with her sister, but she loved seeing whatever Flik was up to even more.

"That was cool!" she said now after she stopped trembling.

"Dot, you have to understand something," Atta replied. "Flik is very smart and he has very good ideas, but his ideas always backfire. He told me once that if a colony didn't have an army or warriors of any kind, a few circus clowns could act intimidating enough to frighten off anyone who trespassed."

Dot giggled. "That's silly! Clowns aren't scary!"

"Exactly. It would backfire."

Dot thought about it for a second. She frowned slightly. "I think that if I really had been missing, he would have been able to find me with that rock," she argued.

"Dot, you don't want to risk it. I think it would be best if you just got rid of that pebble, actually." Atta held her hands out with an expectant look. Dot reluctantly handed over the pebble, which she proceeded to throw over her shoulder. "It's probably time for my training with Mom. Come on."

As they started walking up to the entrance of the anthill, Atta couldn't help but wonder if her sister was right. But she was only five, so how likely could it be?

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**A/N: I enjoy getting reviews. Would you be so kind as to leave me some?**


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